Archive for September 2008

How software is contributing to the current finacial crisis, and some pearls of wisdom from “Why Does Everything Suck.”

The truth is our economy has been in trouble for a long time. It is the "too smart for the room" guys that, at some point in, I would imagine the 90's, figured out how to make money without actually creating any value.

In times of breaking news and shocking events, it’s best to have a go-to website for news and content, and there’s no substitute for the old grey lady, the New York Times. While they might not be groundbreaking in their site design, this is one of the easiest sites on the web to navigate, the content has gotten better in recent years, and there’s just something about reading a newspaper of record.

And…

(I know, it’s been around for a while, but it’s still nifty…)

If you want to see something really cool, try the SilverLight version of the paper. It’s slick because it downloads the paper local, so you can read it offline. If looks like the real version of the New York Times, complete with the type, and if you resize the window, it resizes the article and the number of columns.

It automatically syncs when online like RSS Feeds, and the advertisements are overly obtrusive. It’s not free (and I’m a firm believer that all content shouldn’t be free) but at $15 a month, is cheaper than getting the paper delivered.

When a form has been completed, indicate status clearly and not just with a single line of text

I’ve been promoting the blog a bit lately, and that means filling out a lot of contact forms. One of my pet peeves (and this isn’t just the Sharepoint Blogs site) is that many contact forms have a single line of text that reads something along the lines of, “It’s been sent.” Usually, it’s so small, people resend the same message over and over again. My first assumption is, “Did I do something wrong? Where’s the error text?”

I’m going to make everyone a deal — I’ll write a “thank you for sending us a note” page for free if you need that if you promise to endlessly promote me on your site.

Please spend the extra 15 minutes to add a secondary page that knows the message has been sent and confirms it to the user.

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion USD. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with Mr. Phil Gramm, lobbyist for UBS, who (God willing) will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a former U.S. congressional leader and the architect of the PALIN / McCain Financial Doctrine, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. As such, you can be assured that this transaction is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Clever Workarounds has a very long but strong post about how the complexity of SharePoint exposes organizational gaps because SharePoint is such a comprehensive platform. Another interesting observation: information technology people might not be the best people to plan a SharePoint implementation, because of the struggles of governance.

Is there a product that screams more for competent Information Architects and User Experience experts than SharePoint?

Most clients think they know their business and when they approach User Experience professionals, they’re anxious to get wireframes cranked out. How do we get clients to take a step back and engage in strategic type activites to optimize their technology solutions?

For me, this didn’t happen overnight. I stopped obssessing about whiz-bang interfaces and took an active interest in helping clients think about design in terms of return on investment. Because I always spoke my mind and articulate ideas in terms of how they drive the bottom line, clients began to include me in strategic meetings. Below are some of ways I incorporate strategy focused activities into my process.

Propose the Value Proposition

When I first consult with new clients about a project, I let them know that analysis and research are an integral part of my process. It allows me, the UX designer/Business Analyst/IA Minion to understand their business from the inside out. I explain that analysis, interpreting metrics, product roadmapping, etc. can optimize return on investment. By interpreting indicators on usage patterns, we can pinpoint what’s not working and leverage winning features. The result is a cohesive product vision that differentiate the client from their competitors.

Speak About the Project in Business Terms Not Usability Goals

Articulating your design in business terms is a great marketing strategy. Before my first formal meeting with the client, sometimes even before the contract is signed, I always conduct a quick site audit. This gives me a fresh perspective before I know anything about the project and clients love a fresh perspective. I record my impression on branding, business objectives, and how well the design and implementation drive the business objectives. I always think in terms of return on investment. This gives me fodder to speak about the project in business terms as opposed to design terms. Incidentally, if I get the contract, I bid the hours I spent back into the job. If I don’t get the contract, then it’s good PR.

Request for Quantitative and Qualitative Data

Request for reports at the first meeting. Be prepared to explain what trends and patterns you hope to discover or why you want look at data for specific feature sets. If you don’t yet have an idea which reports you need, tell the client that you will email a list of reports that you want pulled. This lets the client know that research is an integral part of your process. It the project is a start-up, conduct topic and keyword research to define search volume. For qualitative analysis, inquire to see whether any surveys or focus group testing have been conducted and what the findings were. Finally, ask the client how or if the business has responded to the results from analytics and surveys.

Prioritizing Requirements and Use Cases

Don’t be a gatherer of requirements. Be an expert. When conducting interviews with stakeholders, don’t just gather requirements. Work with clients to prioritize requirements and use cases based on business objectives and the research that you’ve conducted. You may propose new requirements to refine and simplify workflows. Always couch your input based on business objectives and the bottom line.

Use Business Objectives, Usability Goals/Strategies as the Measuring Stick for Your Design

I always preface wireframes with business objectives and usability goals. Clients gets sick of this after subsequent meetings, but they learn quickly to evaluate wireframes based on the real business goals. This is also helpful when your wireframes are circulated to other team members, because the business objectives and usability goals is a reminder of the foundations of the project.

One of the struggles with working as a consultant is clients that want everything in the world (and are willing to pay for it), yet don’t focus on the features or items of their implementation that they really need, and sometimes that is written directly in the statement of work. This happens in the corporate world, time after time. Clients are just like everyone else where the features that sometimes come from the CEO but have no return on investment associated with it.

Here’s how I work with clients to help define what they need instead of they want, and I’ve included an Use Case Prioritization Excel Template to start with. It’s simple, and meant to be that way, because long documents aren’t read.

Make a list of use cases that are relevant to the implementation

This is where I always start — what are all the percieved use cases the client needs for system success? When you develop requirements, there will always be additional use cases that will come out of disccusions, the client’s going to have a pretty good idea of what they need to start with, because they called you, right?

Keep the assembly of this list simple, like an Excel document, and that document would have such fields as the use case, who the use case sponsor is, the opportunity, the cost (do a rough swag on this, and more often than not you are going to be 50 percent off because of unstated requirements), the priority (high, medium, low, or an agreed on numbering system as in the example document), and other notes. The sponsor’s important because like it or not, a CEO’s much more important to the project than a QA lackey.

Rank use cases based on importance

Some of the use cases will be absolutely necessary (i.e. if you are working on SharePoint, editing of pages and user permissions would be an absolute requirement). Some requirements, however, may not be as important, such as localization.

Even if that is a requirement, you can have two stages of implementation, planning for localization as a stub and setting up URLs for this versus a full implementation. Because of this, I would list this as two separate use cases, judging this as the simple versus complex implementation.

The importance should be judged on the opportunity, cost, and whether or not it’s an important feature for launch. One of the things to remember when developing use cases is that some can be accomplished through manual processes, like having the database administrator change data through raw SQL if the task doesn’t happen very often. No feature that has only an impact of making or saving $500 a year should be implemented, period.

Develop the system based on that list

The list is your bible for development, and if you stray from it, the development process goes awry. This list can also change; if you get a few iterations down the path, you can reorder items based on changing priorities of the client (or your project sponsor). Remember, this idea is to keep the features light and iterative so changing requirements don’t mean reordering the whole list or building a completely new system.

Keep track of progress with the list

Sometimes with software development, progress is the invisible path that no one sees. If you use the use case prioritzation list of keep track of where you are at (hopefully with honest developers giving you feedback), both the development team and the client will get a true nature of where they are at. In some situations, several use cases might be co-dependent on the same development components, and that should be noted.

It started last year when I began getting interested in analytics, but it’s really transforming. now. I’m not a web analyst, nowhere near. But more and more clients are hiring me to help with product roadmapping. More and more, I’m looking at product design and marketing strategy from a chicken and the egg perspective.

Recently, for several projects, I’ve started with the analytics, the traffic, the market research, search volume, then work backwards to define the solution, the return on investment. So I have the egg, I have to figure what kind of chicken lays that egg.

Usually, clients will build a solution, then develop campaigns to drive traffic to it, but lately, I’ve been getting projects that are reverse. It’s not, “If you build it, they will come.” It’s more like, “They’re here. Now build something that they need.” I’m not just designing some test feature. I’m designing actual new sites with little more than a domain name as a requirement.

My role initially, is to conduct excersises with my client to clearly define the following:

Market sector

Value proposition

Business Objectives

Strategy and brand for the user experience

Marketing Strategy

After this excersise, my goal is to have a mission for the user experience, because a deep user experience will brand the solution. At heart, I’m still an interactive designer. It’s what I love to do. But building a sound business foundation for your design is critical to its success. If you don’t do this, then if you build it, they will not come.

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about automation and touch screens (I think something along the lines of a Microsoft Surface was on CSI: Long Beach Miami last night, close to that nifty technology in Minority Report), and the discussion about ordering food at restaurants came up.

She said something that was translated into, “you know, wouldn’t it be cool if there were touch screens to order food at restaurants.” At that point, I went off on a rant.

There are a few cases that I can think of where technology has improved customer service. Recordings starting the 411 process on most phone directories is one, some directory operations at government operations another, but for the most part, there’s nothing better than a human being when fuzzy logic is needed, or the questions undefined, like, “can I have my burger medium rare?” Self-checkout systems are gathering adoption momentum at supermarkets, but there’s always going to be a certain market segment that’s going to want to talk to Sally the checker.

Here’s why I think that touch screens will always have a low adoption rate at restaurants.

If it takes noticably longer for a computer to perform the task than a person, user adoption will never happen.

I ate at one of those uWink restaraunts, and they have touch screens at every table. You can order food, drinks, almost everything to order. The hope is that the server just brings it out to you.

The problem?

It takes forever to order.

We spent over 10 minutes trying to figure out the interface. That’s about 7 minutes longer than if a server comes over with a piece of paper, and writes down the order. By the time that server could have returned with my beer, we were still entering our order.

Anything that stands in the way of my beer getting to me quicker is a bad thing.

The technology is too expensive.

Each of those stations costs about $1000. Mutliply that by 40 tables in a restaurant, plus replacement costs for sticky fingers, crashed hard-drives, whatever. Do you think most restaurant owners want to spend an extra $100,000 in technology costs on top of the environmental design of the restaurant? And what happens when the system goes down?

Owners love to replace employees with computers when it makes sense financials. It makes sense for ATMs, because they’re open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week without having to take a coffee break. But replicating the same technology at multiple stations isn’t the same thing.

People just want to be taken care of.

Self-service technology has come along way, from support forums on most electronic websites to banking at ATMs and online (I still don’t understand why ATM service fees are so high when it’s cheaper for banks to do business that way instead of having human intervention, but that’s another rant). But in a few situations, people just want to have a sense of getting valu, for their money. Using a touch screen at a restaurant isn’t getting value for my money, but having a server wearing a tie is.

I love books. I have a ton of them. OK, maybe not a ton, but I estimate I must have about 600 books or more. In my days as a graphic artist, I’ve designed two book covers, so I have an affinity for the art of cover design and the construction of books. I read everything from technology books, fiction, and non-fiction. For awhile, I tried to keep all of my books, but I can no longer do so. My shelves are busting at the seams. Once I read a blog about a guy who kept only 10 books. If he bought one, he had to give one away. I strived to be that guy, but I tended to read too fast and couldn’t give them away fast enough.

My list of must-have-books-that-will-always-remain-with me-in-case-I-am-ever-stranded-on-a-desert-island already total up to 50 books or so. I needed an easy and convenient solution to stop my habit of buying books. I’ve been to the local library, but find that it doesn’t have enough of a selection. I’ve even read all of the reptile books from the animals section, but that’s another story. It’s people like me who donate books to the library.

It’s a site where you can trade books, music, movies, and games with other users. It’s a one-to-one trade. Simple as that. I signed up about a year ago, but didn’t use it very much, because there were few users who wanted exactly what I had and vica versa. It was difficult to have matches. When I reactivated my account last month, I found that swaptree had improved the trading algorithm, where users can form a trade ring of sorts.

Since then, I’ve successfully implemented 4 trades. Seems like I’m trading every week. I don’t even have to go to the post office and haven’t been to the bookstore since. I can print the postage online and swaptree will bill me the amount at the end of the month.

The only painful part is entering in the ISBN code of the items I put up to trade. However, the UI manage to alleviate some of the pain by displaying a drop-down of the thumbnail of the book as soon as the system recognizes the UPC, even when I’ve entered it partially. That way, I can confirm that the item I’m entering is correct.

It is nice to know that I am not killing more trees with my habit. Hi, my name is Ha Phan and I’m a book-a-holic.

Usability Counts was just recently named as to the Social Media and User Interface topics on Alltop, which is a self-proclaimed “online magazine rack.” While we don’t think we know about as much as anyone else, we’re included in the same page as some of the top blogs out there. So cool. Maybe someday we can can aspire to be Jeffrey Zeldman.

The only issue: we are really, really below the fold. Don’t get me wrong — I like the new design All has launched — but for my own selfish reasons (more traffic, more targeted users, less pooftas), I wish we were a bit higher, and that there was a different way to view content so I could see items by date and not by blog.

How far down is Usability Counts?

Two scrolls down on the 1900 by 1200 monitor we function on for User Interface, and more than five on Social Media. Almost mad dogs and Englishmen tolerance.

Not all is lost: the good news is that AllTop is human-edited i.e. there’s some kind of vetting process on deciding who belongs, and who doesnt. so the spam aspect would be a bit lower, avoiding the torrent of bad posts Technorati delivers to my inbox.

Alltop needs a content view where items are displayed as they are posted (so there’s some encouragement of consistent posting), and maybe a couple others around autority and reputation. 9Rules does a really good job of this, and tends to push more traffic to blogs. A tabbed approach would be a huge benefit to users, and they could set the default of what they wanted to view first.

One of the great things about SharePoint is it is this complete platform: there are many great features that you can implement allowing end users to manage their own content.

And one of the worst things about SharePoint is that you allow users to manage their own content, which scares end users in most organizations.

We work with a lot of clients who don’t know where that content’s going to come from, because showing little boxes on a site map and empty content areas on a wireframe doesn’t equate to content making it to a published system.

Here’s a few tips about content management systems in general, and SharePoint in specific, that are forgotten during the development process:

If there’s a page in the site map, someone has to write it.

One of the biggest mistakes I see regarding developing websites is there’s time built into the quote for development, requirements gathering, and design, but almost never any time for copy writing. Why is that? Factor in some time not only for writing content, but editing content, because sometimes what you start with is the equivalent to a square peg in a round hole.

There should also be a content style guide (one sheet of paper) that describes the tone of the copy in the intranet. If you are working as a consultant, establish exactly who’s responsible for the content.

If there isn’t any content, it’s good to mock it up.

A legacy from the print work is greeking in text, which is actually latin. It’s the placement of content written in another language to show how the system will work when content is placed in the pages. Lorem Ipsum is a site that generates latin text on the fly depending on your requirements, and is a great resource. This allows end users to see how the system works without focusing on the content on the page.

What happens if the system isn’t full? Plan for this.

One of the biggest misconceptions of software development and information architecture is that all systems start full of content, and there’s never any fallback for when the doors open up and the shelves are empty. Plan for two states: 1) opening up the doors without content, and 2) when the content will grow to fill the site. Remember that you also have to plan for future growth.

Training is good; a SharePoint quick reference guide is better.

SharePoint is a huge product, and expecting the end users to remember what to do after an hour of training is unrealistic. What we’ve done is come up with a tailored quick reference guide that focuses on about 10 key use cases, and it’s the front and back of a tabloid sheet of paper. Users keep it around and refer to it, which limits phone calls in the future.

Let’s suppose you just got laid off or worse yet, fired. Or even worse your primary focus is financial services software. The recession has finally reached into your pockets. You’re without a job, and you need a way to get your shingle out there to pay for rent which you look for a full time gig.

Here’s a few tips to get started without spending a lot of cash:

Don’t spend a lot on new computer equipment

Clients don’t care about shiny, they just want the job done, so a lot of times it’s better to bite the bullet and use what you have before making a big investment in the latest and greatest. Look for services that are more expensive than owning, but less of a cash outlay up front until the cash flow kicks in. Ironically, some of the web-based services are more expensive and more time consuming than real-world based services.

Start a blog

You should start one before you have to hit the pavement because it is personal branding, but one of the great things about WordPress (the blog software this blog uses), it’s free, it’s an excellent content management system for small websites, it’s easy to use and very easy to install.

Even if you don’t have a webhost, many of them, including Dreamhost, have wonderful one-click installs and upgrades that are easy, and Dreamhost is cheap — around $120 a year for as many domains (read blogs) as you want.

Get business cards

When you’re going to all those wonderful events, you need something to hand out, right? VistaPrint does a great job of providing four-color business cards from either a set of templates or a design you provide on your own, and they deliver them in a resonable time. It’s cheaper than Kinko’s, and you can design them in your shorts (while you’re enjoy your unscheduled vacation.

Look at the market

Craigslist.org is a good starting point, because there are a ton of jobs on there that can get you some quick cash. We’re not saying you should be doing websites for $50, but you can at least gauge what the supply and demand is for what you do, and plan your search for gainful employment accordingly. Going after gigs on some of the freelance sites is more successful than you would think, and it’s free.

Price your services accordingly

If you have to work 40 hours a week as a consultant to match the same hourly rate as a full-time employee, don’t do it. You should price your hourly rate at least 30 percent higher than what a full-time employee makes to take care of all the benefits and other things you have to do yourself.

You also need to leave yourself time for marketing your services — if you have to work 80 hours a week to make ends meet, you’re probably doing something wrong.

Figure out your value proposition

If you’re just another counter person at a fast-food restaurant, you don’t have much value other than how they train you. What makes you special? What’s work that you enjoy?

I’m not saying go out and start a second career, but something along the lines of what you are currently doing, especially if you’ve been doing it for a while, would be your best bet. There’s always something in your resume that makes you stand out from your competition.

As usability consultants, we don’t always get a chance to have virtually unlimited resources; for every project that we approach that allows us to do site inventories, competitive analysis, and focus groups, there are more of the “how about doing a site map and putting up a website?” implementations. There’s always an inherent risk with this approach, and probably a good reason why so many information technology projects fail: lack of proper information.

That’s what I find so astounding about John McCain’s choice for vice president candidate, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. This is a real world example of why research is so important to the success of anything, much less a software project.

To put it in context, you could say that McCain had unlimited resources and plenty of time to do the user research to see if Palin was a good candidate for the Republican ticket. Money wasn’t an issue either, and for analysis, there are plenty of news stories and easy targets for humorists out there about Palin and some of the issues she’s had governing the fine state of Alaska.

Yet, he took the “let’s just do the site map and see what happens” approach. I’m not totally against the “throw it against the wall and see what sticks” way of doing things, but if you know a solution is flawed (that solution being Sarah Palin), you figure out ways around it. Forget the issues; every solution has differences of implementation, but some are so obviously flawed that 1) reworking them would be detrimental to the success of the project, or 2) are the wrong direction and lack the depth to succeed.

Why does everything suck, one of my favorite blogs, has a great read about the paradigm shift that’s happening right now because of the current implosion of the economy. He states something to the effect of, “Now it’s time to focus on the productivity of our lives instead of the connectivity of our lives,” refering to social networking.

True. True. Guess it’s time to get away from the business plan in five pages approach (which is much better than business plan on one napkin approach), and get back to basics. That means there’s going to be another shakeout, but at least this time around it doesn’t look like it’s going to be as bad as 2001.

But the reality is that for the world of social networking, they’re running out of users to sign up: we saw this back when I watched the adoption of broadband, there’s always a segment that feels that dial-up is fast enough; the opinion of some of my friends is that one or two social networks are enough, more than that is overkill, and those astronomical growth charts of MySpace and Facebook aren’t going to happen for a while, and if there is a new service, it’s going to steal eyeballs from something existing, which isn’t going to happen unless there’s a very real value proposition.

I think it goes back to an event I went to in March: I was talking with a friend of mine, and the conversations we were having with the startup people were a lot like 2000: looking for money for a project that had very little value to the end user other than, “ain’t this cool?”, and took more time than I wanted to spend because my 24 hours a day are already booked by more valuable pursuits, like drinking.

In the end, productivity is always king.

The other point is that if you are willing to pay for a service, then there’s value. Most people aren’t willing to pay for Twitter, but some are willing to pay for the extended features of LinkedIn, so there’s value. Would you be willing to pay for Facebook? MySpace? Some social networking sites, like Classmates.com do have a subscription model, but have to spam to get there. Is that real value?

If you show businesses and consumers ways to save time (and sometimes money), they’ll pay for it. Everything doesn’t have to be advertising-based, and if you look at some of the major productivity tools, the most successful ones charge for their services. They aren’t going to depend on some kind of crazy advertising-based model, because that requires tremendous scale i.e. it’s better to hit a double sometimes than go for a home run. It might be free to the end users, but it’s never really free.

We focus on this in the consulting world: building tools so they can be more productive in the long run, whether it’s an intranet that stores video for everyone to watch and comment, or an extranet to communicate with their partners, or an internet site that communicates information to end users and in the end limits phone calls to government employees, all real projects that return significant investment value to our clients. If there are ways to use technology where users can be social and more productive, clients and users will march hand over fist to that product.

It’s not so much of a website as an idea: an unconference where the topics are tactical as well as visionary. Where I work at, we’ve been sponsoring BarCamp Los Angeles for a while, and the coverage of cities is amazing.

The navigation should be obvious enough that if you’re standing five feet from the monitor, you can distinguish it

I’m not above picking on sites of companies where I know the people that work there, so I know someone that works at this company. Mac And Jac is a clothing line targeting women aged 25 to 44; the company is based in Canada, and is part of Liz Claiborne. The site and photography is very attractive (I’m a black and white kind of buy), but the one issue I could not figure out was how to navigate through their collection until I saw the “next” link in light grey, as highlighted in the screen shot above.

Where I work at, we had the same issue with a client: they wanted to make all their links grey without an underline.

I’m not against style, but there should be an arrow (or something) indicating navigation links, and it should be easy to read. Navigation points are exactly that: links or other items that allow users to easily distinguish where to go next. If you can’t read next, you can’t go anywhere, right?